OnePlus CEO Pete Lau recently confirmed at Mobile World Congress Shanghai that the company is "working with US carriers" to bring a 5G smartphone to market next year.

That means the OnePlus 7 or possibly the OnePlus 7T is set to be that 5G phone – the sequels to this year's OnePlus 6 and OnePlus 6T.

Those claims have since been backed up by more comments from the OnePlus executive team, reaffirming the company's commitment to getting a 5G handset out in 2019.

This all makes a lot of sense, as 5G would be a perfect fit for the cult Chinese maker, with its penchant for crazy speed and performance syncing well with the rapid data transfer speeds of 5G.

Considering that OnePlus knows what it is doing in terms of hardware, too, with this year's OnePlus 6 flagship absolutely smoking rivals in benchmark tests, a 5G-enabled device next year would make it a no-brainer insta-buy.

OnePlus usually releases its main phone refresh in May or July, so the OnePlus 7 would likely be among the second wave of 5G devices, potentially following Samsung, Sony and Huawei.